This isn’t just our story

“This is my father’s house. They came at five in the morning on 18th May: three Soviet soldiers burst in with guns. It’s just the same as now. They come in the night or the early morning, when you’re asleep and you’re not prepared, you can’t understand what’s happening…

Back then, it was still wartime. Dad was 12 in 1944 and he remembers: all the men had been mobilised in 1941 and sent away, so that when the Germans came in 1942 there were only women and old people and children who grew up for two years under the Germans. The boys, 16, 17 years old, were all put into German uniform; they were taken from their homes and given German uniforms in return for flour and sugar, or else they were told if they didn’t wear it their families would be shot. They had little choice.

When the Soviets took back Crimea pilots were flying over and shot through his house roof. Dad remembered when he came back to Crimea in the 1970s he saw the same bullet holes still there in the roof, covered over with stones. When people asked how he knew which house was his, he said: it’s the one with the bullet holes, and they let him in to look at it. But they never let him have the house back. I’ve never even been inside the courtyard.

Instead when we came back in 1993 dad fought to get an official land plot to build a new house. He always insisted on doing everything according to the law. We lived in a damp container for three years, we all got hepatitis. Me and my brother built the house together with our parents. I was 15, my brother was 17.

This isn’t just our story; practically every Crimean Tatar went through this. No one helped us, no one gave us jobs or land or rights. At school when kids pointed at us we had to say: we’re not immigrants overrunning Crimea, we’ve come home. People were scared that we’d demand our houses and property back, but in fact none of us had documents to prove ownership, because we’d had to leave in such a hurry in 1944. We were sent away as traitors and forced to live in reservations behind barbed wire, having to sign in and out, like we were under house arrest…

Our father was born in 1932. He died in June 2015. My brother’s detention destroyed him. He only lived for two months after that. He was so strong, but the disappointment, what they did to his son, ate up his strength, he just dried up and crumbled away in front of our eyes… After they tried to kidnap my brother, and then beat him up and detained him, dad went to the Russian security services in Yalta. It was a young officer who until 2014 was serving under Ukraine’s security service. Dad said: aren’t you ashamed? He called him a fascist. The officer pretended it was nothing to do with him and it wasn’t his fault…

My father was asked to collaborate with the authorities in Soviet times. He refused. He went to prison for two years; he was in the Crimean Tatar national movement but they couldn’t prove that so they arrested him for hooliganism. Then in 2015 they came to my brother at work before and after they detained him for the first time. They said: we need you, you have to work with us. My brother refused, just as my father had refused even though they offered many times. They said: if you won’t help us then you’ll go to prison. My brother was a human rights defender, he was trying to find out what had happened to the Crimean Tatars who have gone missing since 2014. They couldn’t arrest him for working in human rights or for refusing to cooperate with them, so they arrested him for terrorism. They’ve got no witnesses, no victims, no case. All they have is the desire to put him in prison. And they found a way to put him there, just as they did with our father…

What my father wanted most was autonomy and rehabilitation for the Crimean Tatars, because this stain against us as supposed traitors from 1944 has never been removed. He wanted full rehabilitation, not just a signed piece of paper but restoration of all our property and rights. And when Putin really did sign a law on rehabilitation in 2014, for a short time he was actually as happy as a child. He said that in two months Russia had done what Ukraine had not done in 20 years.

But other than a piece of paper that says we are not traitors, there is nothing. Now my brother is in prison, and my father is dead.”